by Anthology
I strode into the studio and marched past empty cubicles. Brillo Pad Brian and Sean were sitting right where they had been for the last few hours. An array of cameras surrounded them, but only one was operated by an actual human being; the rest were automated or controlled remotely from the control booth.
The cameraman turned, saw my gun, and reached for his own weapon. I shot him in the chest before he could pull on me.
Then I walked towards the hosts.
Brian and Sean both panicked. Brillo Pad went for his gun, his hand shaking with nervous energy, and before the barrel cleared the shoulder holster the gun went off, punching a hole in the green screen behind him. The unexpected shot rattled Sean further, but he was at least able to get his gun out.
I shot him first, blowing away half his face.
Brillo Pad raised his hands in surrender, forgetting about his weapon.
“Any more guys with guns around?” I asked.
“Please, don’t kill me.”
“I don’t know, man. I’m an irrational, shitty little bitch. Who knows what I might do.”
“Those were just words. You need to get a thicker skin, that’s all. This is a man’s world. It’s not anything personal.”
“Seemed pretty fucking personal to me.” I squared the front sight of the revolver with the centre of his forehead, and decided to get a little bit closer. I kept walking until the barrel was pressed to his skin and his eyes went cross looking at the metal shaft.
“You’re not a man,” I told him. “You’re a weak, insecure child playing at being a man. And not even a real man, at that. You’re trying to live up to some outdated, old-world Hollywood ideal of a man, playing dress-up with all your fancy little guns, like you never grew out of playing cops and robbers. You’re not a man, and you don’t know shit about what it means to be a man. You’re a coward who’s afraid of the whole damn world, and nothing more.
“You think this,” I pressed the gun hard against his skull, “gives you power. Until somebody with some actual balls steps up, and then your true colors run, and you beg and you grovel. You had all kinds of shit to say about me, about how weak I was, about how awful I was. Where’s your fucking righteous indignation now? Where’s that smug superiority, that grandiose sense of entitlement you broadcast to the nation? Huh? Where is it?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “That’s what they pay me for. This is a show. It’s entertainment. That’s all it is. You need to understand.”
“I understand entirely.” I pulled the trigger and watched, dully, as he slumped in his chair, the back half of his head obliterated.
Two shots left.
I looked toward the control room, at the still cluster of open-mouthed people stationed behind the long stretch of clear glass. The center camera, now unmanned, went auto, drifting smoothly toward me of its own accord. I watched a woman barking orders, snapping her fingers at people, giving directions to her crew.
Over ten thousand dollars were on the board. The figure kept climbing by the thousands as the seconds ticked by.
Another explosion rocked the studio, and heavy footfalls stampeded through the anteroom. Shouting and gunshot were plainly audible, and too, too close.
“This isn’t a man’s world,” I said, to the camera, feeling the need to speak.
“This is our world. Forget the Kay brothers. Forget their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and their Bible-thumping propaganda, and this Revolver shit. Forget them, and move past them. They want you to hate, they want you to fear. Because they hate, because they are afraid. They want us divided, and they want all of us to be as insecure and insignificant and as fucking petty as they are.
“Outside, this riot they’ve been ignoring. It happens every day. And you know what? It isn’t a riot. It’s not. It’s a war. And it’s at your doorstep right now. This is supposed to be our country, our home. This is our world, our lives. We can fix this. We can change all of this. We can make it better.”
Boots hit the floor, getting closer and closer. Revolver security, or state police, or sisters-in-arms, I didn’t know. I didn’t much care.
I’d come here to die, and I still had two bullets left.
The tally board ran over twenty-six thousand, America eager to revel in its bloodlust and throw money at it? Or something else? It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life, more than I’d ever earn picking bottles out of the trash for their return. More money than my father had seen in ages. Blood money, earned in death.
You’ve had your fill.
“This is Revolver, signing off.”
I shot at the center camera. The electronics exploded and glass clinked to the floor.
Smoke drifted inside, thick, grey and noxious with a chemical stink. Gunfire behind that, and the dull thud of far-off explosions. The moans of a dying city.
I listened to the rattle of armed bodies working their way through the outer work area, maneuvering through the maze of cubicles as they neared the studio.
I hoped that my father was right, and that things could still be fixed—some of it at least.
I made my choice. I did the only thing I could do. I sat. I listened. I waited. Come what may, I waited, the gun in my lap, finger at the trigger.
One bullet left.
Preservation(Short story)
by Michael Patrick Hicks
Originally published by The Cyborg Chronicles
Summary
Kari Akagi is ex-British Special Forces, augmented by her government to be the prime soldier. In the wake of a devastating attack that cost her her legs, she has a new mission—protecting South Africa’s endangered species as a ranger for the Kruger National Park game reserve.
***
Kari Akagi sat in the crook of a massive baobab tree, a rifle in her lap, roughly twenty meters above the low-lying plains of the Kruger National Park.
From her perch she could see the Olifants River, which divided the southern and northern regions of Kruger. The north was elephant country, and she watched as a herd bathed in the shallow depths and grazed along its banks.
There was a simple joy in watching the massive creatures live their lives, in seeing the young ones play.
Their life expectancy was too short for her liking, but the luckiest among them could live for fifty years or more. If the poachers didn’t get to them first.
Her morning had started with news of another rhino killing. The reserve had less than one hundred left, and there was a countdown hanging over the heads of the survivors. Each one dead drove the black market prices of their ever-scarcer horns higher and higher into the millions.
The news had woken her like a kick to the gut, and she’d wanted to rage at the rangers and volunteers who had fucked up and let this happen. Unfair, certainly, but her anger was palpable. Instead, she retreated and cut off her commNet, fuming.
She zoomed in on the Olifants, increasing the resolution of her blink-powered retinal upgrades and recorded the lackadaisical scene playing out below. This was a memory she wanted to keep.
Standing to stretch her torso, she set the rifle aside and raised her arms above her head, holding the pose for several deep breaths. Then she bent at the waist, stretching her spine, shoulders, and the muscles of her one remaining thigh, the flex deep enough that she was able to touch the two long blades that had replaced both feet.
Her legs had been lost to an IED years ago. Her left leg, from the hip down, was a mechanized limb replacement system. Both high-grade prosthetics were equipped with hundreds of ultra-fast quantum-load microprocessors, hydraulics, rotors, flexions, actuators, and sensors. A neuronal interface allowed her to control each limb as if it were the real thing, and the built-in multi-directional response coordinators allowed her to move with ease and grace in virtually any environment.
With her chin practically touching the tough Kevlar shell of the artificial knee joint, she could feel the absorbed heat boiling off the deep blue fabric.
Although she was warm and
hadn’t eaten real food in several days, she had little concern for dehydration or starvation. The military had seen to her well-being both before and after her mandatory four tours in Afghanistan and Syria. Keeping her in-country in such harsh climates that ranged from desert tundra to colder mountain terrain had required significant modifications to her meat suit.
Akagi’s innards had been replaced with artificial organs to regulate her body’s water loss, and nasal cavity inserts and heat exchangers implanted atop her jugular veins and neck arteries inhibited water loss that occurred through exhalation and perspiration. There were even filter systems installed in her bladder and large intestine to capture, concentrate, and store any water lost through digestive waste. In her rucksack was a three-month supply of hard-shelled, egg-shaped candies. Each one contained a liquid center and provided her with her daily requirement of nutrients and calories.
While the military had designed her to be an optimized soldier, she had found a more satisfying niche working as a wildlife ranger. The truth of it was, she had merely traded one war for another, exchanging a cause for a cause. Her cause, nowadays, just happened to have four legs and tusks or horns.
Rising from the stretch, she again lifted both arms over her head and pulled her torso first to the left, then the right, stretching her oblique abdominals.
Her body felt looser, her mind more composed. Until the ping hit her commNet with an urgent alert and a geotag.
Another kill.
She felt her cheeks warm in anger, then quickly cool as her implants triggered a temperature regulation control and systolic dampener. The physical stressors were muted, but they didn’t do shit for her emotional state and only made her feel that much more pissed off.
“Has anyone heard from Gerhardt?” Command asked.
“Negative,” she said. “What was his last status?”
“He checked in for morning debriefing, but no updates since.”
“Roger that, Command.”
Another kill, and now a missing ranger. She swore softly to herself, unsettled.
Clambering down a ladder the park rangers had installed more than half a century ago, the dual-bladed system that comprised her feet hit the soft grass below. She broke out into a run, maintaining an easy pace to the latest kill site, roughly forty-five minutes away.
***
Akagi knelt before the butchered rhino, resting her hand against its still flank and closing her eyes for a moment of quiet respect.
The massive herbivore’s face had been brutally hacked apart, probably by an axe. The horns were missing, naturally. Dried blood stained the earth around the creature.
She cursed the lack of resources and the bribed politicians who abetted in this gruesome horror. The reserve covered more than eight thousand square miles of land, and it was impossible for the small squad to cover all of it efficiently. In a fit of twisted logic, the politicians argued that the reduced population of near-extinct animals meant there was little need for increased funding and the hiring of more rangers. The reservation’s budget was slashed and burned, leaving little more than twenty active field rangers to patrol twenty-two sections of the park.
Their duties had been eased slightly with the deployment of reconnaissance drones, but it hadn’t taken long for the poachers and the syndicates they worked for to grow aware of the extra surveillance. One by one, the five drones were shot out of the sky and the budget for replacements dried up.
Poaching was ludicrously profitable, and the wealthy higher-ups in the syndicates spent good money buying South African politicians and influence within the leadership of preservation agencies. Once upon a time, the reservation had implanted the rhinos and their horns with tracking chips to make life more difficult for the syndicates. As a result, the syndicates went on a spending spree to develop a smear campaign through third-party agencies about how the tracking chips made life more difficult for the animals, and how the reservation was mutilating rhino horns, destroying the vital essence of the rhinoceros. All it took were a few dozen parliamentary members in the syndicates’ pockets to undo all the good the rangers were attempting. Even the rangers and veterinarians on staff were lulled by the big money the syndicates offered. Akagi herself had arrested one of the drone operators, who was tracking the preserve’s animals for poachers, who were being supplied high-grade tranquilizers by one of the park’s veterinarians.
More than six thousand miles away from Syria and she still found herself on the losing side of another desperate warzone, surrounded by corruption, turncoats, and failed leadership. She couldn’t help but laugh to herself as the bitter resentment bubbled over.
Her partner, Okey Ekwensi, stood nearby with his canine companion, Dashi. The black-and-tan German shepherd panted lightly as he watched her movements.
Circling around the fallen rhino, she saw the mess of clumsy footprints from both animal and man. The rhino’s cloven hooves left a large, rounded mark that looked somewhat like a bubbly W. There were five distinct boot treads as well.
Blood spatter along the ground led to the brush, where the trap had been sprung. The blood line along the ground left a clear trail, and she spotted red in the grass. Her mind’s eye pictured, too clearly, the team of poachers surrounding the rhino and hacking at its flanks with their axes. Gore flew off the blades as they tore their weapons free from the animal’s hide, raising them for another strong swing.
The rhino had tried to run, but the men—they were almost always men—had gone for the legs, severing its Achilles tendons. The rhino then collapsed, immobilized in the trampled dirt, where its face was hacked apart and dismembered.
“This is number eight-six for the year,” she said.
“And it’s only March,” Okey said, nodding. He spoke softly, his black skin shiny from the layer of sweat covering him and plastering his fatigue shirt to his chest.
“They’re not going to last the year.”
Okey said nothing. The solemn look on his face said enough. He knew the score as well as she did. What else was left to say? They were standing there quietly in the middle of an extinction event.
“Let the dog loose," she said.
They followed Dashi into the tall grass fields as he tracked the poachers’ scent, Okey keeping close. Akagi surveyed the terrain, seeking out the trail, looking for footprints, scanning the horizon with a variety of ocular magnifications.
Odds were, the poachers were long gone. They spent the better part of an hour following the trail before it went cold. The bent grass and boot treads gave way to flattened earth and the deep impression of tire tracks.
Dashi grew agitated, his panting becoming heavier as he sniffed at the air, straining on the leash. The sudden movements caught Okey by surprise and he nearly lost his grip on the leather strap. He recovered quickly and the two were off and running in a westerly direction.
Akagi followed close on their tails but came to a swift stop, her bladed feet sliding through the dust and briefly losing traction as the stabilizers fought to maintain her vertical equilibrium. The stench was enough to gag her, and she pulled her checkered shemagh over her mouth.
She recognized the soiled green fatigues as that of a ranger, but it was impossible to tell who it was. The man had been gutted, his innards spilled across the ground. His face was a pulpy mess, hacked apart by the poachers. He’d likely stumbled upon them or heard the sound of their vehicle and went to warn them off. Sorry fucker had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As she drew closer, she realized she knew the man. Not because of any physical features, but rather because of the lack of them.
“They took his arm,” Okey said. “His leg too.”
“Gerhardt,” she said, refusing to look away from his splayed form.
Like Akagi, Gerhardt had been fitted with similar prosthetics following war injuries. He’d been caught on the wrong side of friendly fire when his troop had come under attack in Iran. They’d been forced to withdraw into a meat-packing facility and ra
dioed for backup. Drones had been dispatched, and if the operators had bothered to discern the differences between hostiles and friendlies, the payload sure as hell didn’t. A rain of hellfire missiles pounded the surrounding area, eliminating the Iranian Army and laying waste to the surrounding commercial zone. Gerhardt had been too close to an exterior wall and it had cost him.
Always in the wrong place at the wrong time, she thought.
The poachers had had a good day, it seemed. Black market bionics had a nice resale value. Not as much as rhino horns or elephant ivory, both of which had become more valuable than gold and oil combined in certain Asian markets, but still, they fetched a hefty price tag.
Another rhino lost. Another ranger killed, their seventh of the year.
We’re all going extinct, she thought. We’re the last of a dying breed.
She scratched at the scars along the side of her neck, shooing away a mosquito.
“Call it in,” she said. “Get some trucks out here.”
She thought, not for the first time, that this was less of a preserve and more of a graveyard.
***
Whoever had hacked apart Gerhardt’s face hadn’t bothered to chip him. After the support staff arrived to load his remains into the bed of a truck and hauled him back to base, the reservation’s medical officer gave him a quick once-over and checked the man’s data ports.
As with most servicemen hailing from Europe or the fractured American territories, Gerhardt had received cerebral modifications. The Databiologic Receiver of Mnemonic Response, or DRMR, was a standard utility that basically turned ground soldiers into drone equivalents, allowing command centers to monitor, supervise, and record battle conditions directly through otherwise independent operators.